Tick-Tock

New York used to be a city of queues—movies, concert tickets, the Department of Motor Vehicles. Now technology sorts you out. A good line is hard to find. Even some nice old-fashioned lines, such as the one for Shakespeare in the Park, have been corrupted by the practice of people paying other people to wait in their place. That’s not a line. That’s a caste system.

The best honest line in town, these past few weeks, has been the one for gaining entry to “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s video installation at Lincoln Center. “The Clock” is a twenty-four-hour montage of movie scenes containing references to the time of day. Last Wednesday, at 11:07 A.M., sixty-four people were waiting to get in to see it. The line doubled back on itself, along Broadway, just north of Sixty-second Street. A sign near its tail estimated that the wait, from that point, would be an hour and a half, but you could never predict when space would open up inside. The average viewing time was an hour, but, if you wanted to, you could sit in there all day, watching the time go by.

11:14 A.M.

A woman stepped out of the line. This was her second visit to “The Clock.” The first time, she waited forty-five minutes, and watched for an hour and a half. “I’ve been waiting thirty minutes,” she said. “If they’re accurate in their predictions—and I know they’re not, because they underestimated it the week before last and then they overestimated it last week—but, anyway, if they’re accurate, then I’d end up getting in at the same time I did last week, and so would see the same part of the piece again. How stupid is that?” She’d spent fifteen minutes making this calculation and had decided to bail. Her name was Robin Lynn. She teaches English to immigrants. While waiting, she’d thought about how the students in her 4 P.M. class, who had fled troubled places like Burma and Ivory Coast, might react to “The Clock.” “My time does not have the seriousness of intent that theirs has,” she said. “I consider myself lucky to be able to waste my time waiting in line.

“Here’s the most interesting thing about me,” she went on. When the Beatles made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” in 1964, the first closeup of an audience member was of her. “They held the camera on my face for four or five seconds. You’d have thought that the show was about me.”

11:36 A.M.

“We’re waiting for my mother.”

“She’s the catalyst.”

Josh and Annie Gosfield, brother and sister, had been in line for fifteen minutes, and estimated that they faced another seventy-five. They were picking at a corn muffin. Their mother, en route from Philadelphia, was stuck in traffic on Tenth Avenue. The plan had been for her to arrive as they reached the front of the line. (They’d arranged to have her wheelchaired in.) Annie, a composer, said, “I’m up against a deadline, and I’m having a breakthrough. If not for my mother, I would have only intended to come here.” Her piece, featuring violins and jammed radio signals, is supposed to première next month, in Utrecht. Still, she expected to watch “The Clock” for at least two hours. Her brother estimated that he’d last no more than an hour. “I’ve got cultural A.D.D.,” he said. He is a writer and an artist. He and his wife, Camille, who was also in line, had just finished a book, “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well,” featuring interviews with Alec Baldwin, Yogi Berra, Philippe Petit, George Clinton, and others. “We did a meta-analysis,” he said. “If there’s any commonality, it’s self-awareness.” Another commonality, you’d think, would be an intolerance of long lines.

12:17 P.M.

A few places behind them, Kevin, a twenty-one-year-old student at Brown, was reading a library copy of “The Myth of Sisyphus.” It was his day off from an internship. His to-do list for the day, which he’d written on a Post-it and stuck to his Mac, had read, “Breakfast. Coffee. The Clock.” He’d skipped the coffee.

12:38 P.M.

A man wearing a mustard-colored sports coat joined the queue. “Mark De Palma, like Brian De Palma,” he said, introducing himself. This was his fourth time in the “Clock” line. “I don’t plan. I live two blocks away. When I’m on my way by, if I have time, I get in line. I gamble on it. If it doesn’t go fast enough, I leave. I’ve gotten in twice, and quit once. My schedule’s flexible.” He is a research scientist and an engineer, and part of a group that has invented something, he said, “that could be bigger than the Internet.” He also said, “Talking, thinking, and writing can be destructive.” Hard to argue. The clock at Columbus Circle read 12:41. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the August 6, 2012, issue.

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